The greengrocer: The consumer's guide to fruits and vegetables

My 1994 Toyota Camry is hopelessly out of date. No heated seats, no GPS, no CD player. It also has more than a few signs of wear. But it is a car that's firmly attached to the fundamentals: getting you from here to there in comfort and safety at a reasonable price. There may be a lesson here: things that are built on fundamental concerns about function don't go out of style. The Greengrocer is a bit out of date: there are many more varieties of produce available today than in 1972. The attitude towards food is distinctly contemporary, even prophetic. Here was a guy-Joe Carcione- who loved the things he sold and took them seriously. He paid careful attention to the fundamentals and, what a surprise!-his book is both useful and charming as a result. Lynn Hoffman, author of New Short Course in Wine,The and the perennially up-to-date bang BANG: A Novel

I wish my copy (mass-market paperback, 1973, ISBN 0-515-03228-X) were in better shape, but it is simply indispensible for knowing how to buy good vegetables and fruits of the kind most commonly grown and consumed in the United States. It doesn't have much information about nutrition -- the coverage of this in the book is general and not specific -- but it clearly explains for what to look, when to buy, how to store and prepare, etc. The list of vegetables and fruits covered by this book is pretty thorough, although it obviously doesn't cover the explosion of exotic produce that has flooded the market of late. You'll need a more up-to-date book for that sort of thing.As old as it is, the book seems to me to still be just about as useful as it was back in 1973. Agriculture hasn't changed that much since then, and has been a well-practiced art for quite a number of centuries by now. :)